“Artifice and rhetoric seem to be the chief ingredients of the work. The decline from ‘Paolo and Francesca,’ and ‘Ulysses’ is discouragingly marked.” Wm. M. Payne.
+ – Dial. 40: 326. My. 16, ’06. 360w.
“It contains a number of fine passages. But as a vision of life in action, it is feeble and ineffective. And the failing is not merely executive, it is fundamental; the piece is not conceived dramatically, but pictorially and emotionally.”
– + Ind. 61: 520. Ag. 30, ’06. 200w. + Ind. 61: 1164. N. 15, ’06. 50w. Lit. D. 32: 439. Mr. 24. ’06. 1440w.
“The defect of ‘Nero’ is the defect of all its author’s plays. Throughout it we are on the surface of things, never inside them.”
– Lond. Times. 5: 72. Mr. 2, ’06. 1260w.
“It proves him more conclusively than his previous plays did a talented writer of elegiac verse, and expert composer of cycloramic spectacle, who thinks habitually rather in terms of poetic phrase than, as has been the way of the true dramatist, in terms of character, of concerted situation, of human destiny as it is shaped from the clashing, fatal actions of men.”
+ – Nation. 82: 325. Ap. 19, ’06. 710w.
“‘Nero.’ one judges, will not add to the author’s claims as a regenerator of the contemporary English-speaking stage. But it will not deprive him of his laurels as one of the very few contemporary English-writing poets.” Montgomery Schuyler.
+ – N. Y. Times. 11: 173. Mr. 24. ’06. 1360w. N. Y. Times. 11: 382. Je. 16. ’06. 110w.